HOUSES OF MIRRORS

In establishing the House Plan, President Lowell wanted the Houses to be "mirrors" of the College. They were to contain, among other things, an academic cross-section of both students and faculty. Within recent years, however, the tutorial staffs of the Houses have become increasingly overbalanced in one field or in a group of closely related fields. The result is that certain Houses are becoming identified with special fields of concentration--Winthrop and Sciences, Eliot and History, Dunster and Economics--and the much sought-after academic cross-section is rapidly disappearing.

The House Plan was based on the principle of academic and social heterogeneity. President Conant has said that the most important academic contacts are made over the dinner table, and originally the Plan offered students in all fields such opportunity to mingle and to discuss problems of every nature. This discussion naturally produces sharper minds and a keener interest in problems of a general, rather than of a specific, academic scope.

The increasing specialization of the tutorial staffs is due, no doubt, to the fact that unlike the poles of a magnet, like scholars attract like. A Master who is a professor in the sciences will surround himself with young scientists both students and tutors. And once a dominant field is established in a House by the accumulation of several good tutors in that field, applicants for the Houses flock to that House which offers them the best tutorial instruction in their field. As soon as this academic specialization in a House has become a fact it tends to become almost self-perpetuating. New admissions to a House are made with a view to replacing the graduating students who are leaving each tutor; if twenty men in economics are leaving, twenty more economics concentrators will be admitted. Though this is not a hard and fast rule, it is one guide to admissions.

Another disadvantage of an unbalanced tutorial staff is that it requires too many persons to tutor outside their own House. A Student Council report has stated that over forty per cent of the men in Houses have tutors with offices elsewhere. This is the result of one of two things. Either a man's field, if it is a small one, is not represented in any House, or the staff of the House is not well-rounded. Since one of the reasons for the House Plan was closer contact between tutor and tutee, the present situation is very undesirable and could be remedied if each House had a diversified staff.

There are, of course, some things to be gained by a specialized tutorial staff. These include community of interest among a large group of the members of the House, a library well-stocked in one particular field, and the encouragement of such scholastic extra-curricular activities as the Lowell House Scientific Society or the Dunster House Economic Society. If there was not a dominant field of concentration in these Houses then possibly these organizations might not exist. Unfortunately the disadvantages of an unbalanced staff outweigh these benefits.

Something must be done, therefore, to nip the expansion of tutorial specialization before it distorts President Lowell's "mirror" any more. One possible solution would be the shuffling around of all the tutors now living in Houses so as to produce a more nearly rounded tutorial staff in each House. If this plan is objectionable on the ground that tutors, like baseball players, don't ordinarily like to leave their home club, then some other solution must be found. This might amount to filling vacancies which may occur from now on with tutors in fields not well-represented in the various Houses. It was not President Lowell's idea that the Houses should become strongholds of academic totalitarianism, nor should this be the policy today.